News Story

Congratulations Dr Farrell!

Monday 6 Aug 2018

Tracie Farrell successfully passed her PhD viva on Friday August 3rd. Her PhD thesis investigates the affordances of learning analytics for mediating learning. Tracie has conducted a series of in-depth interviews and focus groups with Open University students and educators. Her findings suggest that domain-related epistemological assumptions and previous experience influence how and why an individual could make use of learning analytics insights. Her findings also indicate that learning analytics has the strongest mediatory effect for learners when the technology is capable of exposing them to other learners’ strategies, or when it assists them personally, and continually in goal orientation adoption. The implications of this study are important for higher education institutions looking to implement large-scale learning analytics initiatives, in particular, those with a diverse student body.

Tracie has been supervised by Alexander Mikroyannidis and Harith Alani. The exam panel consisted of Trevor Collins (panel chair), Allison Littlejohn (internal examiner) and Denis Gillet (external examiner). Both examiners praised Tracie’s work and pointed out its importance for informing the teaching and learning practices of the Open University.

Tracie is continuing her research work in KMi, currently working on Harith’s project Co-inform. We wish her all the best in her career!